No Good Deed Hardcover - 2002

Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

SUMMER

In the long list of early prisoner releases, his was one of the least remarked; ostensibly a gift to both sides, in practice welcomed by neither. He walked out of the gates at nine o’clock on the morning of the thirteenth of June, twenty-one years and three months to the day since they had first locked him up. The world lay in the grip of a heat wave so that the air shimmered above the tarmac and it was cooler by far inside than out.

He hung around for a while, as if testing the heat and humidity of the air, an act that did nothing to endear him to those watching. In time, he stooped at the driver’s door of the car waiting at the curbside and then the one inside got out and he took over the wheel. There was a moment when it seemed he might have left his companion standing on the pavement outside the gates but he relented and the younger man, whose face was already on file and who was hardly an easy touch, was invited into the passenger side.

He counted three of them following, in varying rotations, in front or behind, as the car passed east toward the ferry at Larne. Two passengers and a very striking red-headed cabin assistant kept their eyes on him on the crossing to Stranraer. At the terminal, they handed him over to their Scottish counterparts and a different three watched him wave good-bye to his escort and rent a car. They followed in two cars on the road up to Glasgow. He took the tunnel and then the switchback and led them out to the pine forests at the southern tip of Loch Lomond, where he let himself into a self-catering cabin on the shores of the loch. The school holidays not yet being under way, half of the remaining six cabins in the group were conveniently empty and the watchers, with some gratitude, took up position in those on either side of the mark.

An hour after the man’s arrival, he had a visitor. One of the city’s more expensive whores, a woman with well-tapped connections in Ulster, drove up to the door, knocked twice and was granted admission. The watchers, all of whom were young and male, rigged up a microphone and directed it at the bedroom window, recording the results for later posterity. It was thus added to the file that the mark was not fluent in gutter Glaswegian but that his appetites were as diverse as might be expected in any man who has spent his third and fourth decades locked in a cell. The woman left in the early evening and the watchers had no more entertainment than the sound of a man breathing heavily in his sleep.

It was a newer, less seasoned watcher who recognized, around five o’clock the following morning, that she had heard the same pattern of breathing repeated three times in the space of two hours. No one likes to be woken before dawn for the sake of it and so she took the time to play the tape into a portable computer and compare the exact shape of the wave forms before she rang through to her superiors and asked for backup and permission to break in. At six-thirty, the combat team found a dead woman lying on the single bed beside a tape recorder that played a continuous loop of a man’s breathing.

The received wisdom from those on the scene was that the dead woman had been strangled. The pathologist’s report later in the day suggested instead that the ring of purpled bruises on the neck occurred at least twenty-four hours ante-mortem and that the cause of death was, in fact, a simple fracture of the vertebral column between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae. Bruising on the left lower chin and the upper right parietal region showed where the heels of both hands had been applied to achieve the twist. Later examination of the records found this to be the cause of death in at least one previous recorded killing by the same target.

A watch was put on all known associates but was called off on the grounds of wasted expense after a month with no result. A full case report was lodged with Interpol to the effect that the suspect was loose, whereabouts and intentions unknown. It is an unfortunate testament to the technological age that all those involved felt a computer flag to be a sufficient warning to the local police forces and no one deemed it necessary, or even useful, to pick up the phone and tell the one person who might really have needed to know that Colm Connaught O’Neil was out and looking for trouble.

SPRING / FRIDAY / 14 MARCH

“Jamie?”

The child opened his eyes. It was dark in the room, darker than it had been, and there was snow feathering down the outside of the window. They had promised it for Christmas and it came instead for Easter, a gift from the god to make the world a cleaner, purer place. Large flakes flared orange in the sodium glare of the streetlight and piled in drifts against the lower sill, tinged to yellow by the years of filth and tobacco smoke staining the glass.

“Jamie? Can you hear me?” The child was entranced by the snow. He watched the patterns of it grow before his eyes and let the voice wash over him. “Jamie? Please? I need your help.” The voice was smooth, like the glass, but warmer. It flowed around him, easing the pain. He curled tighter in his chair and turned his face to the dark. The snow had deadened all the other sounds as the evening gave way to night: the noise of cars in the street, the kick-out from the pubs, the smash of a bottle dropping from the top of a neighboring tenement down onto the street below, the lacerating give-and-take of a beating taking place somewhere far away but not quite out of earshot. That pain was not his. In these small things, life was kind.

Inside the room the quality of the quiet was different. His mother and her friend had been silent long since but there was no surprise in that. He had seen the needles and the small ritual of injection. He knew the pattern of this and the time it would last and he knew he was safe, from that quarter at least, for most of the darkness. The other sound, the voice, was new and uncomfortable. Usually nobody spoke and if they did, it was simplest often not to listen. He had a lot of practice in not listening. Watch the things that move beyond the window and don’t listen. That way is safe.

“Jamie? Jamie, listen. The men will come back soon and when they do, they will hurt you again. You know that. If you help me, I can stop them.” The voice was soft and low, and the accent strange, like the ones on the news, entirely unlike the flat vowels and guttural glottal stops of his world. He couldn’t place the voice and that worried him. He hunched his shoulders, pulling himself smaller, blocking out the noise. It came through all the same. “Jamie? It’s me, Sandra. Trust me. I can get us out of here. But you have to help me first.”

Sandra. He struggled to fit a face to the name. An image came into focus of flashing amber eyes with black stripes flaring outward, like a tiger. The thought made him smile. He turned into the dark of the room. “Jamie?” She sounded more hopeful. “Over here. Under the sofa.” Under the sofa? Now that really was strange. With regret, he watched one last layer of snow build on the sill and then left the safety of his chair.

The sulfured glow of the streetlights pushed in a semicircle as far as the television but beyond it the room was as black as the night outside. The stench of stale cigarette smoke, cheap scent and congealing chow mein hung, waiting, in the darkness. By the window, the air was cold and clean and welcoming. He nearly turned back but the voice drew him on. “Jamie? Not much farther now.” So he went on, feeling his way forward, past the bottles and the needles, the remains of the takeaway and the debris of clothing, to the inert bulk of his mother’s body. She lay across the sofa, locked in a sleeping embrace with one of the other two women. He searched among the tangle of limbs and heads for the flash of light from the eyes.

“Underneath,” said the voice. He crouched down on the floor. She was right. There was, indeed, a woman lying underneath the sofa. His eyes were adjusting slowly to the absence of light but even in the gloom he could see the pale skin on the undersides of her arms, with the flat white planes of the old scars and the fresh patterns around them of handprints and bruises. Her hair was crushed and matted, a scarecrow’s nest in bottle blonde with the streaks of scarlet through it that matched the fake suede of her skirt. A glimmer of gold pulsed at her navel, rising and falling with the steady rhythm of her breathing. With difficulty, because the space from the base of the sofa to the floor was not great and the weight of his mother made it less than it might have been, she turned her head to look at him. That wasn’t good. Her face was a mess …more of a mess than usual and only partly because her makeup was gone. He had watched her in the mornings as she sat on the edge of the bath, using the only mirror in the house to help her paint her face, and he knew the care she took to hide the things she didn’t want the world to see.

Now the world could see what it liked, and more. A fresh bruise, bleeding at the center, ran across one cheekbone and up to the inside corner of her eye. On the other side, the stark white snake-line of an old scar bisected one eyebrow and ran on down the side of her nose to make a notch on the edge of her upper lip. On her temple, a palm’s breadth of smooth white burn tissue pulled the skin tight, angling up the edge of one eye so that it seemed as if she were forever doubting what he said. Then she blinked and the eyes gathered him in and he was lost. He was entranced by her eyes. He knelt down and put his head level with hers and peered into them. She smiled for him then and it was a new smile, crooked and conspiratorial and really very warm. He chewed his lip for a moment, thinking, then he lay flat on his stomach and put his head on one side, looked into her eyes and smiled back. She laughed at that, soft and breathless and sliding into something not quite controlled that lasted longer than either of them expected. She caught herself, eventually, and breathed deep so that the navel stud rolled on the wave of it.

“Jamie, sunshine, you’re gorgeous and I love you dearly but this is really, really not the right time. I need to get out of here, kiddo. I’m no good to either of us like this. Do you think you could try to untie me? Just one hand…I can do the rest.”

He sat up on his heels for a better look and saw what the dark had hidden before: that each wrist, each ankle, was fixed tight to one leg of the sofa. The hand nearest him twitched, palm out, the fingers waggling like the legs of a dying spider. The voice wove out around it. “Jamie? Can you see the knots?” He could. He nodded. “I can’t see you anymore, sunshine. You’ll have to speak to me.” He thought about that for a while and decided safer not. Instead, he put his hand down to touch the palm, then moved to the rope. “All right, good lad.” There was a new warmth to the voice. “Now, can you untie it. Please?” Another novelty. “Please” was not part of his everyday vocabulary by any stretch of the imagination. He felt around the square-sharp edges of the wood to the opposite side where the knots gathered. “You might need to use your teeth to loosen them.”

He tried. He tried for the novelty of being asked, for her smile and for the memory of the tiger’s eyes. He tried until the rope was wet with his spit and his fingers slid across it as he tugged. All the while he listened to her breathing, slow and even, and the steady words of encouragement. And the promises. He listened most to the promises.

“Jamie, if you can get me out of here before they come back, I promise you, I’ll take you away from here. There’s a cottage in the country, with a mountain at the back of it and you can see the sea from the front door and there’s a bedroom you can have all your own. Would you like that, Jamie? But we need to get free, both of us, or none of it will happen and what happens instead will be . . . don’t think about that. Think about the cottage. And the snow. Think about the snow, Jamie. With the weather we’ve been having, the snow will be six feet thick outside. We can take sledges up the mountain and race them down to the back door. We can make snowmen as tall as the house. I can make you an igloo outside the back door and you can sleep in it overnight and still be warm. Would you like that kind of snow, Jamie?”

He did like the idea of such snow and although he had no idea what an igloo was he thought he might like that too. But liking it didn’t get the rope untied; in fact, if anything, the wet of his spit was swelling the fiber and making it tighter. He sat back on his heels and bit a nail in frustration and without really thinking about it, he said, “Can’t.”

There was a brief silence and then, “Can’t you? Bugger it. Well, never mind, you can talk. That’s something.” The voice was still calm. If he’d said “Can’t” to his mother, the screaming would have gone on till his head rang. “OK. Don’t panic. They’re not finished downstairs yet.” They weren’t, although if you stopped to listen to it, the sounds of pain were different. There was a sense of things accelerating toward a close. He shut his ears and turned back to the snow. It was piling deeper on the sill and the swirls of filth on the glass made new and interesting patterns. He moved back toward his chair.

“Jamie, no! Don’t crap out on me now. We’re still in with a chance. We need a knife. Can you find a knife for me, Jamie?” There was a grating edge in the voice now. Threads of panic wove through it, dangerously seductive. He knew panic well. It was not a place he wanted to be. The snow drew him closer. It was falling faster so that the world outside the window was more white than black and the flakes were smaller, almost like dust. He reached the chair and curled himself into it.

“Jamie. Listen to me. The snow will melt soon. The rain will come back. What will you have then? Do you really want to go on living like this? Jamie? Are you listening to me? Jamie?”

He wasn’t listening. He curled tighter and shut the voice out.

“Shit.”

And then there was nothing. The snow fell dizzyingly fast. He could have slept, hypnotized by the swirling speed of it, but the final word echoed round the inside of his head. Shit. Just that. A single sound, more of a breath than a word, full of defeat and fear and the promise of pain and all the things he was used to. But there was a kind of dry, twisting humor with it that he wasn’t used to at all. It was a voice to go with the smile and the eyes. He listened to it stir round in his head for a while, feeling the newness of it, and then he slid down from the chair and padded out across the hallway to the dark pit of the kitchen. The bread knife was in the washing-up bowl. He found it eventually, fished it out and dried it and took it back to the sofa and knelt down so that she could see it in his hands. He thought she might cry at the sight of him but she didn’t. She smiled instead, which was good.

“Jamie, I love you. Can you cut the rope, sweetheart? See if you can slide the knife down behind my hand and the wood . . .” He heard the suck of an indrawn breath, bitten off, and then, “Yes. Good lad. Now, move it up and down. Good. Push it outward, it needs to bite on the rope. Like that. More. Good. Don’t stop now, kiddo, for God’s sake, don’t stop now . . . yes.” That last, whispered exultation as the final strand parted and then, “Thank you.”

She worked her fingers for a moment, gripping and regripping the hilt of the knife until the life came back to them. She swore with the heat of that but not for long. When she could trust herself to move, she eased across and freed her other hand on her own. He had to help her with her feet because there wasn’t room for her to reach down but they came quicker because he knew what he was doing and he didn’t make her bleed. He cut the last piece of rope binding her left ankle and then knelt out of the way as she slithered sideways toward him. “Jamie, I love you forever.” She hugged him tight, running her fingers in the tangled straw of his hair. The am- ber eyes flashed for him, pulling in the orange light from the window, spinning it round and throwing it out like a beacon. She kissed him, just lightly, on his forehead and smiled so that, for one long moment, his world filled with color. And then, because it was magic, and magic never lasts, the colors faded.

The woman was shaking. He realized that when he realized she wasn’t smiling anymore. It could have been the cold. He would have liked it to be the cold but her skin was gray, the way his mother’s went gray when she was up on the smack and the shakes had that extra tremor that said it was more than the perennial problem of too few clothes in an unheated room. He searched her arms for the signs of the needle and found it…a single exploded vein spreading out on the ghosted flesh of her inner arm. She saw him looking and shook her head. “It wasn’t me, kiddo.” But his mother said that often enough and his mother’s teeth chattered in much the same way as she said it. He looked into her eyes, and the colors were already less bright. The smile was forced, as perhaps it had been forced before. The arms that held him let him go. “Jamie, trust me. We can talk about it later. Just now we have to get you out of here.” He said nothing. Outside, a man cried out, a desperate, long-drawn sound, rising up the scales to fracture in agony at the top. The silence rang loud in its wake. Her head snapped up at the noise of it. “Oh, Jesus Christ, Luke,” and then, in a voice from which all color and all tremor had gone, she said, “Stay here. I won’t be long.”

She was taller than his mother and lithe and she moved with a feral, fluid grace and a sense of purpose that his mother lacked. He heard the scuff of her bare feet as she ran up the stairs. The light tread moved across the ceiling above him toward the bedroom and something happened in a cupboard and then she was back, standing beside him, fastening a pack round her waist and staring out of the window with an intensity that all but stopped the shaking. She had changed; he could feel it. Sandra-before was all scarlet plastic and east Glasgow vowels and a laugh that could cut through glass. If she spoke to him, it was to get him to bed, out of the way, and she did it as if he were invisible, which meant that he was. Sandra-under-the-sofa was a friend in the darkness, wide amber eyes and a smile that broke through the silence. Sandra-now was different, and not necessarily pleasant.

He was setting off down the road to nowhere but she shook her head and nodded forward and so he stopped and in time he realized that she was listening, not looking, and then, when he let go of the snow and listened with her, he could hear what she could hear, which was nothing. Under all the small, wilderness cries of the night, the sounds of the beating had ended.

In the enclosed space of his world, where all women wear cheap plastic miniskirts and all men mete out violence, the end of it somewhere else means only that it is coming closer. He shrugged deep in the chair and bit his lip and started in earnest back down the track to the other world where he would be invisible in this one.

“No. Not now.” A hand fell light on his shoulder. “We need to get you out of here while there’s still time. Get your shoes and we’ll . . . oh, shit, no we won’t . . .” Down at street level, a door slammed shut. Hard boots and harder voices filled the stairwell. “Fuck.” The fingers tightened in frustration, digging hard through his T-shirt to the collarbone below. It hurt. He turned round to protest but she had already let go and there was a gun in her hand that had, perhaps, been there all along and a shine in her eyes that was quite the opposite of the magic he had seen before. He might have tried to run from her then but the hand came back to his arm and the voice that went with the eyes said, “Don’t move, Jamie. Just sit here and look out of the window and whatever else happens, don’t move a muscle. Stay invisible, kid. You can do it. I won’t be far.”

And then she was gone, feather-footed, out across the hallway to the dank pit of the kitchen, and there was time enough for a single oversized flake to spiral down the full length of the window before the front door smashed open and the world caved in.

Media reviews

"Scott’s prose suits her tough yet sensitive heroine and her storytelling is equally unflinching. Graphic violence contrasts with wilderness beauty in a thriller that has plenty of touching moments ... [Scott] delivers humane characters and supercriminals, romance without sentimentality, and adventure without easy answers. Orla McLeod’s American debut ensures that she will take her place in the top ranks of fictional female detectives."
-Publisher's Weekly


“Compulsive reading from page one to the shattering conclusion.”
-Denise Mina, John Creasy Award winning author of Garnethill

“There’s not a word wasted in this unflinching novel, which still manages to demonstrate the profound power of love. It’s a joy to read something so intelligent, so direct and so beautifully crafted.”
-Val McDermid, Golden Dagger Award winning author of A Place of Execution

“Manda Scott picks us up by the scruff of the neck, drags us kicking and bumping along the rough side of life, then makes us fall in love with her characters along the way. WOW, JUST...WOW.”
-Laurie R. King, Edgar Award winning author of Folly


“Gritty, literate and engaging, No Good Deed is an exceptional achievement.”
-J. Wallis Martin, Edgar-nominated author of A Likeness in Stone